Building the Innovation DNA

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The future of business is building around the relationships you are forming, the level of participation onto platforms and building ecosystems. These form relationships and networks to accelerate your potential innovation solutions

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Knowledge Graphs have a real potential to become highly valuable, topical and relevant. If only we can get them prised out of the engineer, data scientists, or software experts hands.

We simply should so we can get this concept fully out into the real world, that of applying as solutions to real client problems, it would really help. I get tired of hearing about “use cases”, where concepts like KG often get caught up in, that never-ending validation.

Is this validation simply because it does not work, it is too much hard work delivering the promise within the concept? Or the approach has too much complexity around it and needs massive resources to undertake?

KG needs a real resource momentum and a determination to break through uncertainty. Its huge value should drive it, and caution should be modified and lets go out and validate it, in the real world.

If any of these “constraints” are the case, then we do need to “hack this” differently, as Knowledge Graphs has what I see an incredible potential, as an application solution that should be deemed as far too important to keep under wraps. We need to instill a sense of urgency into this. Why, well read on. Continue reading →

There is huge value in applying the three horizon framework into your thinking. It is as useful a framework that you can get, to help decide where you are heading.

It is not just for innovation application, that can determine innovation activities. It has multiple values in any organization thinking and alignment.

The 3H informs the decisions to be taken, by recognizing their importance to the future and ‘frame’ resource allocation, identify current capability gaps to resolve.

It helps to enable the whole organization to “get onto the same page” and move towards that desired future.

This 3H thinking helps break down complex issues. Thinking in different horizons prompts you to go beyond the usual focus of fixing innovation just in the present it provides the connections of the present with the desired future. The 3H builds portfolio design, outline the steps to resolve in any complex challenge, it ‘informs’ strategy and builds the business case for taking a specific direction to that ‘desired future’.

If you want to read more on the three horizons then take some time out to explore the “insights and thinking” resource page shown under the ‘tabs’ above.

I recently applied the three horizons thinking to ‘frame’ a new innovation designContinue reading →

There has been an awful lot to absorb when it comes to skills and how organizations need to be designed for the future. The suggestions have come ‘thick and fast’ from so many sources.

The number of helpful reports, observations and suggestions are constant and becoming overwhelming to translate effectively.

How can we map a new pathway for shifting current practices and transform them?

Where do we focus, what do we recognize as organization practices that can begin to transform the organization and re-equip it for a different future?

After working through a number the one that held my attention and has become central to my thinking to take organizational practices forward was provided by a recent report from McKinsey “How to create an agile organization”. This report has been part of a broader ‘agile’ series from them but this one specifically gave me my necessary anchor point, to move forward with my own design thinking for agility and innovation.

Agility for me is vital, it allows us to increasingly be adaptive in an uncertain world.

As innovation continues to be central to growth far more in the future it is our ability to adapt and adjust to all the uncertainties and this requires the ability to be agile. Continue reading →

We all in the middle of a re-orientation of our ways to undertake innovation as a process and in its design.

The past belief was that a product was your island and pathway to secured profits, today this alone no longer works. We are learning to connect in completely different ways.

We are learning how to interact with a connected system as products move into products services, and digital, all connected and combined.

It is how we design and explores “smart” products and for this we are reliant on others, having a growing dependency on external parties. We are building our innovation in new collaborations and diverse networks of expertise and understanding.

The emergence of platforms and ecosystems within our connected product design are increasingly taking a central role.

We are in the middle of it, some of you may not have noticed its impact and change but it is significant on the understanding of innovation, in it’s future design.

Often this era of change is not as well-recognized or being faced up to, as you would expect.

Many companies are still in denial or not wanting to address the significant legacy and change required.

Innovation has gone from being islands of knowledge, developing new products and services exclusive to that one company, then quickly copied by the competitors, into something radically different.

We are moving into innovation activities that are built more on collaborative and co-creation approaches, where cooperation and exchanges are more built around platforms and formed in ecosystems.These ecosystems gather around a concept or transformation that requires this collective approach and require a more radical design and become very unique in the end result .To achieve this innovation has gone digital, pure and simple. Continue reading →

This quote is from the former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Henry Rumsfeld, who mentioned: “unknown unknowns” (Rumsfeld, 2002).

Since then, people have started using quadrants of knowledge, i.e., known known, known unknown, unknown known, and unknown unknown, to understand and explain the nature of risk but also of leading to an opportunity.

For innovators so much of innovation is hard to detect, it needs discovery and working through these quadrants of knowledge as well. We need to treat ideas the same on how anything needs assessing but it needs to pass through a different thinking about knowledge understanding, as there are ‘known knowns’ and ‘unknown unknowns’ and we need to prepare for both within our innovation activities.

Our pursuit in life is often the same as our innovation efforts, it is in the search for discovery. Often it happens, that we already feel better equipped for exploring and observing by just getting out of our usual everyday working environment.

Innovation has had a bigger brother moving into the house next door; Digital Technology and between them, they have been busily knocking the walls down, to share the future going forward. The two have become interlinked, you seem to always need the one to respond to the other. Maybe it is a “digital – innovation twin” that shapes the physical world with digital understanding- think about the current Industrial Digital Twins for IIoT solutions.

Seriously, have you not noticed the more we work in the innovation space, digital and technology have become inseparable and part of any innovation solution. The innovation funds are increasingly being switched to digital or technology solutions and the output of the discoveries from this digital technology need innovation to then be applied. A virtuous loop.

Managing in this shift has become more intense and committing.

The reliance on deeper insights, more data, greater communications is changing the way we undertake innovation. Speed, scale, and scope are greater within the mix than ever before. We are testing uncertainty constantly, validating a part, pivoting more, experimenting and prototyping to work through this deciphering. Data specific, technology-driven, innovation invigorating.

Organizations are spotting opportunities faster than ever. We are cutting across borders, teaming up with start-up’s, past competitors to seize these opportunities. Continue reading →